


Last Sunrise

by thevalleyarchive



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Canon Disabled Character, Gen, The People's Tomb Fic Jam: Dream, canon typical gross flesh magic, it's sad about dulcie hours let's go!!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-25
Updated: 2020-09-25
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:22:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26640613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thevalleyarchive/pseuds/thevalleyarchive
Summary: Dulcie contemplates her hopes and dreams while she waits for the shuttle to take her to Canaan House
Comments: 10
Kudos: 40





	Last Sunrise

**Author's Note:**

> This is for the People's Tomb Fic Jam week two: Dream. Writing this got me very riled up about how deep-down awful and voyeuristic the Seventh House is. Anyway, hope you guys like this.

The shuttle wouldn’t be here until first light, yet Dulcie found herself utterly unable to sleep, and for the first time in years it wasn’t because of her cough, or the tingles of pain that raced from the center of her chest to her outermost extremities each time she took air into her lungs. After spending so much of her life carefully measuring each minute, savoring each fleeting moment that would be gone all too soon, she found herself utterly unsure how to deal with this burning, incessant eagerness to accelerate the hours before her and reach that moment when she would board a ship bound for the First House. In so many ways, she knew, it would be the end of the life she had lived so far and the beginning of a new one, perhaps one where every burning protest of her nerves didn’t serve as a reminder to make better use of her precious minutes. How wonderful it would be, once she was a Lyctor, to simply spend a whole day in bed, in a private bedroom where no one would swoon over how beautifully she wasted away, where no maddening reminder of her approaching end troubled her rest. How wonderful it would be, for the first time, to truly _rest_.

But it quickly became apparent to Dulcie that no rest of any kind would come to her tonight. She gave a sharp tug to the thanergetic strings of the beguiling corpse that stood in attendance of her needs, puppeteering it to begin the lengthy process of dressing for the day. Even with years of experience, there was only so much she could do to compensate for her limited mobility when it came to putting on the delicate dresses that filled her wardrobe. On more than one occasions, she had allowed her impatience to get the better of her and had loosened some of the bloody tissue in her lungs with her too-sharp movements. The coughing fit that that inspired would always slow her down far more than simply taking it slow, and, depending on how far along in the process she was, it might also ruin her dress, which would necessitate that she restart. Her wasting face and body were beautiful – the blood and mucus she coughed up was not.

Dulcie puppeteered her beguiling corpse to her closet and selected one of her more substantial dresses – this one was only about a third lace, dyed a beautiful rose gold – as well as a fresh pair of stockings and some comfy undershorts. She no longer wore any sort of chest covering; the extra pressure on her chest cavity was too incapacitating to be endured, and it had been a simple matter to adjust her proportions with flesh magic so that one was no longer necessary. That, too, her house had approved of, for it contributed even more to her waifishness.

Her servant laid the clothes she’d selected on the bed next to her and held out its hand. Dulcie reached down to the sack of hardened epithelial tissue at the end of her pulmonary shunt and pinched it off of the tube, sealing both as she did. She held the sealed bag of blood and mucus in her hand for a moment, feeling the weight of the fluid shift, then handed it off to her puppet for disposal. With a touch, she coaxed the end of her shunt to grow, stretching and ballooning out to form a new reservoir to collect the discharge from her lungs, and pressed it into the flesh just above her right hip, willing the tissues to grow together and bind in place. Dulcie took a bit of time to sink it as far into her body as was safe, and to flatten the exposed wall so that it would be all but invisible through her clothes.

That done, she set to the task of dressing herself. That process was in no way remarkable, save for in the slowness and care she took with how she bent and twisted so as to avoid an episode. She set her servant to brushing her hair in the meantime, and once that was complete, to retrieving her makeup. She was the Duchess Septimus, the embodiment of the Seventh House and all that it valued, and so even in the middle of the night with only the dead for company, she must appear perfectly beautiful to any hypothetical eyes that might look upon her. Dulcie smiled to herself, imagining her peers would look at her at the First House if she were to arrive in her nightgown with her hair in one enormous rat and blood all down her front. Though she’d never seen him in person, she could imagine Palamedes bowing seriously to her, a compliment falling from his lips so sincere that every one of her Seventh poets would tear their sonnets up in shame. The smile deepened when she realized exactly how soon she would, at long last, meet her friend in person.

Finally presentable enough for her midnight wandering, Dulcie directed her puppet to gather her wheelchair, and then to help her into it. A few moments later, she was gliding through the empty halls of her house, pushed by her beguiling corpse, past murals and mosaics of aching beauty and sorrow, and, eventually, out onto the shuttle landing pad beneath the twinkling stars.

Alone, Dulcie stared off into that vast, awe-inspiring cosmos spread out above her. The expanse of it all made her simultaneously feel pinned to the ground by the weight of infinity, and as though she was floating freely among those tiny, enormous pinpricks of light and fire. There was a fierce emotion out between the stars, a heady, visceral rush that no poem or song could ever truly capture, and she let it wash over and through her until it all but lifted her out of her chair.

Fiercely, joyfully, Dulcie whispered into the sky, “This is the last night. Tomorrow, I leave this all behind, and they will have no more of mine.”

At the First House, Dulcie would find immortality in the service of the Kindly Prince, or she would find her death. She would never spend another day in this confection of a castle in her perfect pain, surrounded by servitors waiting eagerly to cry greedy tears at the sight of her wonderous agony. She was finished. She had resisted their urges to marry and breed, to continue the line of perfectly distilled misery that stretched all the way back to the Resurrection, and it would die with her. There were lesser branches, of course, cousins eager to pick up where she had left off, but their suffering was inferior to hers, and it would be generations before someone like her could be produced again. It settled in, fully and finally, that Dulcie had given all that she ever would to this house that she loved, this house that she loathed. That realization brought with it a surge of emotion so heady and powerful that she could not contain her laugh of pure triumph, and even when it brought on an awful fit of coughing, her mood was not dulled.

Dulcie spat the last of her blood onto the ground next to her and lifted her face to see a tall, muscular man standing on the edge of the landing pad. When her eyes met his, he smiled.

“Protesilaus!” Dulcie exclaimed, injecting a hint of reproach into her voice. “It’s late, and you have an early morning! Go back to sleep.”

“Respectfully, Duchess,” said Protesilaus in a warm voice, “my day begins when yours does.”

“If I needed you, I would’ve sent for you,” Dulcie complained. “I’m just looking at the stars.”

“Did the stars have something funny to say to you?” he asked with a slight eyebrow raise.

Dulcie laughed again, more carefully this time. “In a way, I suppose. They got me thinking about this place, and how deeply, genuinely good it will feel to leave behind the only home I’ve ever known.”

“This planet has ever been a cage to you,” Protesilaus said softly. “You have always deserved better than this vale of tears that you were condemned to rule.”

“You don’t need to speak so harshly of the Seventh for my sake,” Dulcie said, feeling a small pang of guilt as she looked at her cavalier. “I know it has been kind to you. I know you will miss it while we’re gone.”

Protesilaus sighed. “There is beauty here,” he admitted, “and much that I have and do cherish. But I was given a kinder path than you. I have not been made to suffer for that beauty, while you have seen so much of suffering and so little of everything else, and that is a tragedy greater than anything our people have ever written. I promise, my lady, I will see that you find something greater than this, or I will die trying.”

“Please don’t die for my sake,” she said. “I may die long before I have even a chance of completing the Lyctoral trials.” Dulcie looked back up. “But I hope I don’t. I hope I succeed. I hope that I leave the First House a Lyctor, ready and able to explore a universe full of wonders that I can’t even begin to dream of. In the service of the Necromancer Divine, I could finally know true majesty, not some hollow facsimile bought and paid for in blood and agony.”

They were quiet together for awhile. Eventually, Protesilaus said, “You’re not going to come back, are you?”

Dulcie shook her head. “Never. Not if I live ten thousand years. But I’ll make sure you do. I promise, no matter what awaits at the First, whether I succeed or die, I will get you home safe.”

“I wonder if I can make it in time to see the irises open,” he mused to himself, his expression warm and dreamy. “I do not doubt that you will see many wonderful things, Duchess, but all of that,” he waved his hand up at the heavens, “is nothing compared to the purity of watching a perfect white iris blossom.”

Dulcie rolled her eyes affectionately. “Agree to disagree.” She regarded Protesilaus seriously. “You should go home for a few hours,” she said. “You should spend one more night with your family, while you can.”

“I will miss them all terribly, my lady,’ he replied solemnly, “but they will be in my heart wherever we go, and I know I will see them again. I would rather spend your last night in the Seventh with you. You’re my family too.” Protesilaus placed one enormous hand delicately on her shoulder and gave a very soft, comforting squeeze. “One flesh, one end.”

A tear crept into Dulcie’s eye. She took her cavalier’s hand. “One flesh, one end.”

They stood there together for hours, staring off into infinity, until the sky began to lighten ever so slightly. It was not a true, dramatic day like some of the inner planets might have, for the Seventh was very far from Dominicus, but it was still a sight that took Dulcie’s breath away, in a way that she did not mind at all.

Something pinged in Protesilaus’s pocket. He pulled out a pad and gave it a look, his eyebrows furrowing. “Shuttle requesting permission to land,” he said. “Trust the Emperor’s representative to be early. They weren’t supposed to get here until after first light.” He punched in an authorization. “Guess we’ll have to wait until the First for a sunrise.”

“Maybe not,” Dulcie said, even as she heard the sound of descent thrusters fire somewhere over head. “Look!”

She pointed out to the edge of the horizon, where the ring of baby blue light against the sky that heralded the arrival of Dominicus gave way to a single sliver of pure silvery-white, larger and brighter than any other star in the sky.

It was beautiful.

Dulcie soaked in the first glimmer of sunrise, a smile on her face, and waited for her fate to land.


End file.
